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A review by lpm100
Chiang Kai Shek: China's Generalissimo and the Nation He Lost by Jonathan Fenby
dark
informative
slow-paced
5.0
Book Review
"Chiang Kai-shek: China's Generalissimo and the Nation he Lost."
5/5 stars
"UNIMAGINABLE Chinese suffering after the collapse of the Qing dynasty; A TOUGH read."
Of the book:
-507 pages @27 chapters=19 pps/ chapter; 5 parts
-Range, 8 to 29 pages per chapter
-Bibliography=393 sources
-934 citations; 1.85/page OR ≈35/chapter>
-Includes an excellent index and dramatis personae (and that is very useful, because it is difficult to keep track of all of the many characters / monikers).
-Each chapter needs to be reskimmed and resynopsized because the information overload makes it a bit difficult to follow.
*******
Short Attention Span Lessons:
1. China does not learn from the past, and the Chinese future is the past. And vice versa.
2. From the American perspective: neutrality and non-alignment are the wisest choices.
*******
There is a great deal of information here, and all the chapters have to be re-skimmed.
The overwhelming events and bloodshed after the Communist take over of China have made it such that the years between the end of Qing and the beginning of the CCP dynasty seem to be a nebulous, overlooked period of history. But, a lot of events did happen during those times and this book fills in some of those blanks.
The author does as well as can be expected with creating an interesting narrative arc about a large number of random / idiosyncratic events stapled together to form history.
I read/have read a lot of these books on Chinese history, and these days I can only read one or two of them per year; the desparate-yet-futile misery makes these books too draining. And many historians and students of history are frustrated by the circular nature of Chinese history and their EXTREME OBDURACY to learning from it. (The present reviewer shares that frustration.)
Even as inane as the events around the rise and fall of the Nationalist party may be, in reality they are just variations on a theme of Chinese events that repeat incessantly throughout history: One emperor gets knocked over to be superseded by another emperor who, in turn, gets knocked over by another. And so on, ad infinitum. In between, there is untold human misery and suffering.
In that way, Chiang Kai-shek may have been the snowflake that caused the avalanche of events that made it such that China is what it is. But, in reality any other snowflake could have caused the same avalanche and in some way, the events of the revolution and Civil War were quite predictable.
Out of all these many "Regional Generals" (and this is the nicer term for "warlord") it's not hard to imagine that one of them would eventually get the upper hand. And it was, incidentally, CKS.
Some of the book is working out trying to understand the triangular involvement between the Nationalists, Communists and the Japanese.
As many different accounts of these events as I have read, it may be a fool's errand to try to determine which is true:
∆Version 1 is that the Nationalists cooperated with the Japanese (every single episode of state-run CCTV since 1949);
∆Version 2 is that they left the Japanese alone so that they could wear themselves down trying to colonize a country that was way too big for them (Simon winchester, "The Man Who Loved China");
∆Version 3 is that the Nationalists allowed the Communists to survive at the behest of the Russians, who held CKS's son hostage. (Jung Chang and Jon Halliday). This book suggests that that NEVER happened, and he could have been exchanged for a Polish Communist in whom the Russians were interested. (CKS refused [p.205]: "It is not worth it to sacrifice the interests of the country for the sake of my son.... Chiang reflected that a person would be remembered for moral integrity and achievements, not because he has an heir.") Also, Chiang Ching-Kuo had returned from Russia with his wife at the point that the Communists were at their weakest point and almost destroyable (p.285).
*******
The same question keeps coming up over and over, which is: WHY did it have to be this way?
Even at the time of the events in this book, there had been a Chinese state for over 2,200 years. And yet: Orderly and regular changes of government were still not figured out. Nor military technology, nor central banking
The number of shifting alliances between this or that Regional General and the Central Government are just dizzying.
The Western invitation to China to trade (Britain) came 3/4 century before the same invitation came to the Japanese (United states, gunboat diplomacy), and yet: China let all of that time pass (learning absolutely nothing about self-defense) and large parts of it were annexed by a country 1/10 its size (Japan).
*******
Much of this story is predictable based on my long experience with Chinese people:
1. Typical Chinese intransigence to learning anything new. (Most clearly illustrated in the chapter about the attempts of Chinese speaking General Stillwell to help CKS in his quest to build a modern military. All the suggestions that Stillwell made had actually been made by the Germans a long time ago when they were trying to help the Nationalists build a military.)
2. Given a choice between 2 steps to do something the right way and 5 steps to try to outfox someone to convince that it is done the right way then they will take the latter path.
3. Some Chinese boss somewhere brings a foreign expert to a country only to ignore his advice/actively subvert the management process. (BEEN THERE, DONE THAT).
4. (p.400) "China has already invented everything that can be invented and has nothing to learn from anyone else." (You may laugh at this, but I have been told before that "we Chinese have such a long history we have already invented every word and there are no new ones to be invented.") Foreign ways / ideas are the problem and traditional Chinese culture is the cure.
5. Playing foreigners against each other (p.450).
*******
Second order thoughts:
1. Some things are the same everywhere: when you have some men get into power, the first thing they do is set about the business of trying to mount every woman in the country.
-Sun "Baby Daddy" Yat-sen was a whoremaster, and you "couldn't keep him off the women" (p.37).
-CKS had several marriages and ultimately ended up sterile because of an STD contracted from one of his MANY liaisons.
-If Chairman Mao didn't screw every single person in the country, it's not because he didn't try.
-Honorable mentions: Zhang Zuolin (5 wives); Zhang Zongchang (so many concubines that he gave them numbers because he couldn't remember their names; French, Russian, Korean, Japanese, American, White Russian).
2. In terms of military coups / targeted assassinations /other attempts to take over: the Africans have NOTHING on the Chinese. Simple, matter of fact changes of government at periodic intervals are things that Chinese have not mastered even in 2,300 years of statecraft.
3. The Chinese future is the past. And vice versa. The Nationalist Revolution (KMT) claimed to be about overthrowing imperial overlords and building a republic. But, Yuan Shikai set about the business of trying to make himself Emperor only 3 years after the collapse of Qing. And then CKS. And Mao *was* the emperor for 27 years.
4. Looking at these events just around the Republican revolution, I would say that in terms of terrorist attacks: the Arabs have NOTHING on the Chinese.
5. Who is who in this game of musical chairs? The KMT was trained by the Russians; CKS received his first military training in Japan; Ho Chi Minh (a.k.a. Nguyen Ai Quoc) was trained in China by the KMT (p.68); Communists were allowed to join the KMT as individuals but not as Communists; certain of the warlords model themselves on George Washington (p.104).
6. African levels of brutality. ("Wrapped in whiting and burned alive/slits made in their bodies in which candles were inserted and burned before they were hacked to death / the leader of a railway strike is beheaded on the station platform / two prisoners of battle are cut up in the streets and their hearts and livers hung in a cook shop" [p.104]. Or: "they found the decapitated, bound bodies of all Gu's family except for his younger son." [p.195]. Or: "The commander of the first unit was taken prisoner and tortured is he crawled around confessing his sins. His tongue was cut out, and his cheeks pierced before his head was cut off, wrapped in a red cloth, nailed to a board by the ears, and floated down the river toward the retreating forces." [p.198].)
7. African levels of kleptocracy. 27 taxes unsolved. Paper taxed 11 times going down the Yangtze to 160% of its value. 673 different types of land taxes. "Welcome subsidies." Central government trains robbed. President of China embezzles $20 million. Opium is outlawed but monopolies are leased to the highest bidder. Opium Suppression Bureaux raise money through fines.
8. Something that is unique about Communism in Asia is that the military is an arm of the party that controls the government. Let's be absolutely clear that: the fight between the Communists and the KMT was not about controlling a government that owned / financed the military. Instead, it was about putting A Party in charge (p.197) whose military was the property of the party only. A similar story is told in North Korea.
9. There are lessons that the United States could learn (but they won't!), which are that: a) Hubris is not enough to build a country--and if it was, China would be the center of civilization; b) "Allies" are more properly understood as "fairweather friends" (p.310).
Interesting factoids:
1. CKS was actually initially trained in Japan and his military target at first was the Manchurians who were the sovereigns of the Qing dynasty.
2. Even as brutal and graphic as was the rape of Nanjing, over a full order of magnitude more people died just in the Great Famine.
3. Final death tolls (p.497): Civil war, 5 million; Sino-japanese conflict, 10 million; 3 million in other CKS campaigns. (18 million total).
4. CKS ruled over Taiwan for 26 years come and he was buried above ground because he was waiting on the reunification of Taiwan with the Mainland. Taiwan has moved on from him, and they were starting to remove him from banknotes as of the time of this book's publication (2003). 20 years later, his picture has been removed from all of the bank notes and statues of him and Sun-Yat Sen are being relocated is Taiwan develops its own identity apart from the KMT.
A few interesting things from each chapter:
1. CKS: a) A mama's boy; b) Yet, a woman beater (p.24)--at the powerful height of 5'6 and 130 lbs.
2. Taiping Rebellion= 20 million dead. Sun Yat-sen was baptized as an Xtian. Yuan Shikai as an 83-day emperor, and the commencement of another warlord/"regional general" period.
3 CKS picks up yet another wife (and he also courteously sterilized her with his STDs). He is Chief of Staff of the KMT at this point.
4. KMT (this is the era of Sun Yat-sen) was a *regional* party in control of Guangzhou, and they were extremely corrupt even then (extortion taxes, bribes, and "duties" all over the place). The Soviet Union is the one that did the training of the KMT army at Whampoa (Russians initially thought that they were a sure bet than the fledgling Communist movement), and it is at this point that CKS was able to demonstrate exceptional administrative talents. Sun Yat-sen died in 1925.
5. CKS is Garrison Commander at this point, and later becomes the top KMT military figure --of Guangzhou-- after absorbing 30K troops from a Hakka Regional General. The national government of the Republic of China is proclaimed on July 1, 1925. There was a currency in use at that time just for the city of Guangzhou. Enter T.V. Soong, the Harvard trained finance minister. There is the typical Chinese trick of playing the foreigners (Russians in this case) one against the other.
6. A chapter on Chinese Regional Generals (a.k.a "warlords"), of which CKS was but one of many. We are introduced to the characters Zhang Zuolin, Wu Peifu, Yan Xishan, Zhang Zongchang, Feng Yuxiang.
Soldiers<-->Bandits. Almost complete lawlessness and Hobbesian each against all. 4 to 6 million people dead in just one famine come in 1920-1921.
7. (p.201). WW2 started in Asia 8 years before hostilities broke out in Europe.
8. Characterization of that den of iniquity, Shanghai (as well as the foreign concessions). Opium dens and prostitution as far as the eye can see. Mafia and extortion as well. (If you want to understand the PRC Chinese aversion to opiates and why they execute smugglers so readily, you need to look no further than these historical events.)
9. The Nationalists cooperated with mobsters (Big Eared Du shows up a lot), and they summarily executed Communists and labor union rivals. KMT's links with the Chinese Mafia was helpful in extorting money from businessman by ransoming their children (p.150). By this point, the Nationalists still do not have the full cooperation of regional generals - - who are an active threat.
10. Disentangling the convoluted connections of the Soong--Chiang--Sun family. (In Hanyu Pinyin: Song--Jiang--Sun.) CKS coldly dumped Wife Number Three to marry Meiling Soong of the wealthy Soong banking dynasty. Sun-Yat Sen (intellectual architect of the Republican Revolution) married into the same family, making him the brother-in-law of CKS. T.V. Soong, Meiling's brother, was a wealthy man who took care of a lot of the financing of the KMT. (The Soong family was also strangely Westernized: 1. They were methodists; 2. Who ever heard of Chinese people willingly eating jellied consomme, pigeon breast, and mangoes?)
11. CKS overtakes several warlords, and several competing politicians. He pushes back the Communists. One famine after another (6 million died just in one).
12. Mukden (Shenyang) Incident. Japan engineered a pretext to take over Manchuria. CKS knew that the KMT military could not overpower Japan, but that caused Communists to see / portray the Nationalists as weak and accommodating.
13. More Sino-Japanese skirmishes, this time in nanjing. More shifting alliances between CKS and Regional generals. The Japanese setup lots of incidents to deliberately make Chinese government officials lose face (p.223)
14. CKS was conservative, Sinocentric, and committed to preserving the rural status quo of wealthy landlords lording over impoverished peasants (who were farming with poor techniques/technical competence and getting low crop yields - - in spite of claiming 50 centuries of farming). The situation in the country was so bad that even though CKS became leader, he could not remedy it dash dash which may have been a task too much to ask of any mortal.
15. (p.262). The Long March started out with 80-100Kmen and 2000 women and ended 369 days later with 5,000 people. They were chased by the KMT and practiced survival by avoidance fighting only intermittent skirmishes
16. CKS prioritized getting rid of the Communists over fighting the Japanese. His strategy had been to let the huge country and the tenacious Chinese people slowly wear down the Japanese, but his hand was forced for political reasons: he had to appear to have nationalist character in order to claim legitimately leadership. The war dragged on for 8 years and casualties were somewhere between 10-11.7 million. CKS I had 31 divisions. Poorly trained and poorly equipped. Japan had 17 divisions, but properly manned. It took three fully staffed Chinese divisions to match even one Japanese.
17. Rape of Nanking. 300K civilian Chinese dead in 6 weeks. KMT lost somewhere between 180K and 300K as against the Japanese 70K. The farming area between Shanghai and Nanjing was the graveyard of nearly 1 million Chinese. The end result was forfeiture of China's wealthiest city and drawing the Japanese into the central government's base area. One scene after another of Japanese brutality.
18. CKS: "I am the state!" Madame CKS's flawless English and social skills help to charm Western diplomats and larger audiences. Chinese casuals up to this date were about 1 million, as against 62,000 Japanese (12,600 of whom died from illness). Apparently Japanese thought that death in battle was glorious (p.331).
19. The Generalissimo spent 6 years in Chongqing and brought ≈600K of Jiangsu refugees with him. Appalling conditions. Run by factions of regional generals, with an illiterate population that took drinking water from a river where 500 tons of sewage flowed each day. Rampant tuberculosis, dysentery, cholera, and smallpox.
20. Japanese made Chongqing the most heavily bomb city in the world as well as making use of biological warfare. Their campaign was total warfare: kill all, burn all, destroy all.
21. CKS, the idiot, and his interactions with Joseph Stilwell in the latter's attempt to train the Nationalist army and bring it up to speed. Stillwell was the highest Foreigner in the Chinese government of the time, but it was impossible for him to get his subordinates to follow orders and cks was simultaneously unable to delegate anything and unwilling to listen to expert advice. The beginning of a lot of unforced errors.
22. Exposition of Madame CKS: a very charismatic figured that was able to endear the Americans to the Chinese cause. Because of her acting as interpreter, she was able to insinuate herself into processes for which she was not qualified (p.398). Famine in the heavily bombed Chongqing, and mother's exchanged children. ("You eat mine, I'll eat yours". p.398)
23. Unforced errors by CKS, one right after another: 200,000 Nationalist troops guarding 50,000 Red troops while Chongqing is raped; unwillingness to form a united front with the Communists. Unwillingness to fight in Burma to open up land supply lines for Chinese troops.
Chinese troops were poorly trained, with a kill ratio of 40 Chinese to 1 Japanese. (Peasants also HATED the corrupt KMT troops, even burying them alive when they fled from the Japanese.) CKS would not send equipment to his soldiers (for fear of independent-minded generals), with the result that there was 1 gun for every 3 soldiers.
Some of the provinces collaborated with the Japanese. Some of the Nationalist troops even sold food to Japanese as Chinese people starved. The KMT was fatally weakened by the Japanese "Operation Ichigo."
24. This is the period after the defeat and unconditional surrender of Japan, and the surviving world powers are recalibrating their strategy based on this new information. Patrick Hurley (about as mentally sharp as the Joe Biden of 2023) became the point man on China. His American colleagues describe him as a senile old man who couldn't keep his mind on any subject (p
438). The Communists are still relatively weak at this point.
25. CKS had ≈half a dozen fully operational divisions, each with 11,000 men. On paper it was one thing, but in reality it was another very weak thing. The junta government very determindely sets about making enemies of the common people (bad inflation / economic conditions / confiscatory taxes while the KMT lived in luxury). US tried repeatedly to get him to make friends with the Communists, but he would not. Several truces have the Communists time to regroup.
26. Hyperinflation creates more official corruption, and the Communists make friends with land reform. Nationalists stay in cities and ignore the vastly more numerous countryside. More missteps cost CKS 100,000 men and the numerical advantage in favor of the Nationalist shrinks from 3:1 to 2:1. By mid November, the Communists were in control of all of Manchuria. At this point, CKS has used up all of his chances, and Truman is aware that the aid ends up mostly in the bank accounts of the "Four Families" (Songs/Chiangs/Kungs/Chen brothers).
The Communists had more boots on the ground in the countryside, and therefore more contacts. They also believed in total annihilation.
The Americans (yet again) have a confused policy and poor understanding of the facts on the ground.
The Huai-Hai campaign (Xuzhou) cost the Nationalists 200,000 men.
Epilogue: Final collapse and flight to Taiwan. (A cute play on the famous Jewish phrase: "Next year in Jerusalem" as "Next year in Nanking.") Final assessment of CKS, and speculation about counterfactual scenarios.
FINAL VERDICT: A very tough read. Not for the faint of heart.
Vocabulary:
Comprador
Satrap
Puttee
brigandage
incommoded
strafe
marcelled hair style
flapper dress
pine marten
solar topi
Yalta agreement
"Chiang Kai-shek: China's Generalissimo and the Nation he Lost."
5/5 stars
"UNIMAGINABLE Chinese suffering after the collapse of the Qing dynasty; A TOUGH read."
Of the book:
-507 pages @27 chapters=19 pps/ chapter; 5 parts
-Range, 8 to 29 pages per chapter
-Bibliography=393 sources
-934 citations; 1.85/page OR ≈35/chapter>
-Includes an excellent index and dramatis personae (and that is very useful, because it is difficult to keep track of all of the many characters / monikers).
-Each chapter needs to be reskimmed and resynopsized because the information overload makes it a bit difficult to follow.
*******
Short Attention Span Lessons:
1. China does not learn from the past, and the Chinese future is the past. And vice versa.
2. From the American perspective: neutrality and non-alignment are the wisest choices.
*******
There is a great deal of information here, and all the chapters have to be re-skimmed.
The overwhelming events and bloodshed after the Communist take over of China have made it such that the years between the end of Qing and the beginning of the CCP dynasty seem to be a nebulous, overlooked period of history. But, a lot of events did happen during those times and this book fills in some of those blanks.
The author does as well as can be expected with creating an interesting narrative arc about a large number of random / idiosyncratic events stapled together to form history.
I read/have read a lot of these books on Chinese history, and these days I can only read one or two of them per year; the desparate-yet-futile misery makes these books too draining. And many historians and students of history are frustrated by the circular nature of Chinese history and their EXTREME OBDURACY to learning from it. (The present reviewer shares that frustration.)
Even as inane as the events around the rise and fall of the Nationalist party may be, in reality they are just variations on a theme of Chinese events that repeat incessantly throughout history: One emperor gets knocked over to be superseded by another emperor who, in turn, gets knocked over by another. And so on, ad infinitum. In between, there is untold human misery and suffering.
In that way, Chiang Kai-shek may have been the snowflake that caused the avalanche of events that made it such that China is what it is. But, in reality any other snowflake could have caused the same avalanche and in some way, the events of the revolution and Civil War were quite predictable.
Out of all these many "Regional Generals" (and this is the nicer term for "warlord") it's not hard to imagine that one of them would eventually get the upper hand. And it was, incidentally, CKS.
Some of the book is working out trying to understand the triangular involvement between the Nationalists, Communists and the Japanese.
As many different accounts of these events as I have read, it may be a fool's errand to try to determine which is true:
∆Version 1 is that the Nationalists cooperated with the Japanese (every single episode of state-run CCTV since 1949);
∆Version 2 is that they left the Japanese alone so that they could wear themselves down trying to colonize a country that was way too big for them (Simon winchester, "The Man Who Loved China");
∆Version 3 is that the Nationalists allowed the Communists to survive at the behest of the Russians, who held CKS's son hostage. (Jung Chang and Jon Halliday). This book suggests that that NEVER happened, and he could have been exchanged for a Polish Communist in whom the Russians were interested. (CKS refused [p.205]: "It is not worth it to sacrifice the interests of the country for the sake of my son.... Chiang reflected that a person would be remembered for moral integrity and achievements, not because he has an heir.") Also, Chiang Ching-Kuo had returned from Russia with his wife at the point that the Communists were at their weakest point and almost destroyable (p.285).
*******
The same question keeps coming up over and over, which is: WHY did it have to be this way?
Even at the time of the events in this book, there had been a Chinese state for over 2,200 years. And yet: Orderly and regular changes of government were still not figured out. Nor military technology, nor central banking
The number of shifting alliances between this or that Regional General and the Central Government are just dizzying.
The Western invitation to China to trade (Britain) came 3/4 century before the same invitation came to the Japanese (United states, gunboat diplomacy), and yet: China let all of that time pass (learning absolutely nothing about self-defense) and large parts of it were annexed by a country 1/10 its size (Japan).
*******
Much of this story is predictable based on my long experience with Chinese people:
1. Typical Chinese intransigence to learning anything new. (Most clearly illustrated in the chapter about the attempts of Chinese speaking General Stillwell to help CKS in his quest to build a modern military. All the suggestions that Stillwell made had actually been made by the Germans a long time ago when they were trying to help the Nationalists build a military.)
2. Given a choice between 2 steps to do something the right way and 5 steps to try to outfox someone to convince that it is done the right way then they will take the latter path.
3. Some Chinese boss somewhere brings a foreign expert to a country only to ignore his advice/actively subvert the management process. (BEEN THERE, DONE THAT).
4. (p.400) "China has already invented everything that can be invented and has nothing to learn from anyone else." (You may laugh at this, but I have been told before that "we Chinese have such a long history we have already invented every word and there are no new ones to be invented.") Foreign ways / ideas are the problem and traditional Chinese culture is the cure.
5. Playing foreigners against each other (p.450).
*******
Second order thoughts:
1. Some things are the same everywhere: when you have some men get into power, the first thing they do is set about the business of trying to mount every woman in the country.
-Sun "Baby Daddy" Yat-sen was a whoremaster, and you "couldn't keep him off the women" (p.37).
-CKS had several marriages and ultimately ended up sterile because of an STD contracted from one of his MANY liaisons.
-If Chairman Mao didn't screw every single person in the country, it's not because he didn't try.
-Honorable mentions: Zhang Zuolin (5 wives); Zhang Zongchang (so many concubines that he gave them numbers because he couldn't remember their names; French, Russian, Korean, Japanese, American, White Russian).
2. In terms of military coups / targeted assassinations /other attempts to take over: the Africans have NOTHING on the Chinese. Simple, matter of fact changes of government at periodic intervals are things that Chinese have not mastered even in 2,300 years of statecraft.
3. The Chinese future is the past. And vice versa. The Nationalist Revolution (KMT) claimed to be about overthrowing imperial overlords and building a republic. But, Yuan Shikai set about the business of trying to make himself Emperor only 3 years after the collapse of Qing. And then CKS. And Mao *was* the emperor for 27 years.
4. Looking at these events just around the Republican revolution, I would say that in terms of terrorist attacks: the Arabs have NOTHING on the Chinese.
5. Who is who in this game of musical chairs? The KMT was trained by the Russians; CKS received his first military training in Japan; Ho Chi Minh (a.k.a. Nguyen Ai Quoc) was trained in China by the KMT (p.68); Communists were allowed to join the KMT as individuals but not as Communists; certain of the warlords model themselves on George Washington (p.104).
6. African levels of brutality. ("Wrapped in whiting and burned alive/slits made in their bodies in which candles were inserted and burned before they were hacked to death / the leader of a railway strike is beheaded on the station platform / two prisoners of battle are cut up in the streets and their hearts and livers hung in a cook shop" [p.104]. Or: "they found the decapitated, bound bodies of all Gu's family except for his younger son." [p.195]. Or: "The commander of the first unit was taken prisoner and tortured is he crawled around confessing his sins. His tongue was cut out, and his cheeks pierced before his head was cut off, wrapped in a red cloth, nailed to a board by the ears, and floated down the river toward the retreating forces." [p.198].)
7. African levels of kleptocracy. 27 taxes unsolved. Paper taxed 11 times going down the Yangtze to 160% of its value. 673 different types of land taxes. "Welcome subsidies." Central government trains robbed. President of China embezzles $20 million. Opium is outlawed but monopolies are leased to the highest bidder. Opium Suppression Bureaux raise money through fines.
8. Something that is unique about Communism in Asia is that the military is an arm of the party that controls the government. Let's be absolutely clear that: the fight between the Communists and the KMT was not about controlling a government that owned / financed the military. Instead, it was about putting A Party in charge (p.197) whose military was the property of the party only. A similar story is told in North Korea.
9. There are lessons that the United States could learn (but they won't!), which are that: a) Hubris is not enough to build a country--and if it was, China would be the center of civilization; b) "Allies" are more properly understood as "fairweather friends" (p.310).
Interesting factoids:
1. CKS was actually initially trained in Japan and his military target at first was the Manchurians who were the sovereigns of the Qing dynasty.
2. Even as brutal and graphic as was the rape of Nanjing, over a full order of magnitude more people died just in the Great Famine.
3. Final death tolls (p.497): Civil war, 5 million; Sino-japanese conflict, 10 million; 3 million in other CKS campaigns. (18 million total).
4. CKS ruled over Taiwan for 26 years come and he was buried above ground because he was waiting on the reunification of Taiwan with the Mainland. Taiwan has moved on from him, and they were starting to remove him from banknotes as of the time of this book's publication (2003). 20 years later, his picture has been removed from all of the bank notes and statues of him and Sun-Yat Sen are being relocated is Taiwan develops its own identity apart from the KMT.
A few interesting things from each chapter:
1. CKS: a) A mama's boy; b) Yet, a woman beater (p.24)--at the powerful height of 5'6 and 130 lbs.
2. Taiping Rebellion= 20 million dead. Sun Yat-sen was baptized as an Xtian. Yuan Shikai as an 83-day emperor, and the commencement of another warlord/"regional general" period.
3 CKS picks up yet another wife (and he also courteously sterilized her with his STDs). He is Chief of Staff of the KMT at this point.
4. KMT (this is the era of Sun Yat-sen) was a *regional* party in control of Guangzhou, and they were extremely corrupt even then (extortion taxes, bribes, and "duties" all over the place). The Soviet Union is the one that did the training of the KMT army at Whampoa (Russians initially thought that they were a sure bet than the fledgling Communist movement), and it is at this point that CKS was able to demonstrate exceptional administrative talents. Sun Yat-sen died in 1925.
5. CKS is Garrison Commander at this point, and later becomes the top KMT military figure --of Guangzhou-- after absorbing 30K troops from a Hakka Regional General. The national government of the Republic of China is proclaimed on July 1, 1925. There was a currency in use at that time just for the city of Guangzhou. Enter T.V. Soong, the Harvard trained finance minister. There is the typical Chinese trick of playing the foreigners (Russians in this case) one against the other.
6. A chapter on Chinese Regional Generals (a.k.a "warlords"), of which CKS was but one of many. We are introduced to the characters Zhang Zuolin, Wu Peifu, Yan Xishan, Zhang Zongchang, Feng Yuxiang.
Soldiers<-->Bandits. Almost complete lawlessness and Hobbesian each against all. 4 to 6 million people dead in just one famine come in 1920-1921.
7. (p.201). WW2 started in Asia 8 years before hostilities broke out in Europe.
8. Characterization of that den of iniquity, Shanghai (as well as the foreign concessions). Opium dens and prostitution as far as the eye can see. Mafia and extortion as well. (If you want to understand the PRC Chinese aversion to opiates and why they execute smugglers so readily, you need to look no further than these historical events.)
9. The Nationalists cooperated with mobsters (Big Eared Du shows up a lot), and they summarily executed Communists and labor union rivals. KMT's links with the Chinese Mafia was helpful in extorting money from businessman by ransoming their children (p.150). By this point, the Nationalists still do not have the full cooperation of regional generals - - who are an active threat.
10. Disentangling the convoluted connections of the Soong--Chiang--Sun family. (In Hanyu Pinyin: Song--Jiang--Sun.) CKS coldly dumped Wife Number Three to marry Meiling Soong of the wealthy Soong banking dynasty. Sun-Yat Sen (intellectual architect of the Republican Revolution) married into the same family, making him the brother-in-law of CKS. T.V. Soong, Meiling's brother, was a wealthy man who took care of a lot of the financing of the KMT. (The Soong family was also strangely Westernized: 1. They were methodists; 2. Who ever heard of Chinese people willingly eating jellied consomme, pigeon breast, and mangoes?)
11. CKS overtakes several warlords, and several competing politicians. He pushes back the Communists. One famine after another (6 million died just in one).
12. Mukden (Shenyang) Incident. Japan engineered a pretext to take over Manchuria. CKS knew that the KMT military could not overpower Japan, but that caused Communists to see / portray the Nationalists as weak and accommodating.
13. More Sino-Japanese skirmishes, this time in nanjing. More shifting alliances between CKS and Regional generals. The Japanese setup lots of incidents to deliberately make Chinese government officials lose face (p.223)
14. CKS was conservative, Sinocentric, and committed to preserving the rural status quo of wealthy landlords lording over impoverished peasants (who were farming with poor techniques/technical competence and getting low crop yields - - in spite of claiming 50 centuries of farming). The situation in the country was so bad that even though CKS became leader, he could not remedy it dash dash which may have been a task too much to ask of any mortal.
15. (p.262). The Long March started out with 80-100Kmen and 2000 women and ended 369 days later with 5,000 people. They were chased by the KMT and practiced survival by avoidance fighting only intermittent skirmishes
16. CKS prioritized getting rid of the Communists over fighting the Japanese. His strategy had been to let the huge country and the tenacious Chinese people slowly wear down the Japanese, but his hand was forced for political reasons: he had to appear to have nationalist character in order to claim legitimately leadership. The war dragged on for 8 years and casualties were somewhere between 10-11.7 million. CKS I had 31 divisions. Poorly trained and poorly equipped. Japan had 17 divisions, but properly manned. It took three fully staffed Chinese divisions to match even one Japanese.
17. Rape of Nanking. 300K civilian Chinese dead in 6 weeks. KMT lost somewhere between 180K and 300K as against the Japanese 70K. The farming area between Shanghai and Nanjing was the graveyard of nearly 1 million Chinese. The end result was forfeiture of China's wealthiest city and drawing the Japanese into the central government's base area. One scene after another of Japanese brutality.
18. CKS: "I am the state!" Madame CKS's flawless English and social skills help to charm Western diplomats and larger audiences. Chinese casuals up to this date were about 1 million, as against 62,000 Japanese (12,600 of whom died from illness). Apparently Japanese thought that death in battle was glorious (p.331).
19. The Generalissimo spent 6 years in Chongqing and brought ≈600K of Jiangsu refugees with him. Appalling conditions. Run by factions of regional generals, with an illiterate population that took drinking water from a river where 500 tons of sewage flowed each day. Rampant tuberculosis, dysentery, cholera, and smallpox.
20. Japanese made Chongqing the most heavily bomb city in the world as well as making use of biological warfare. Their campaign was total warfare: kill all, burn all, destroy all.
21. CKS, the idiot, and his interactions with Joseph Stilwell in the latter's attempt to train the Nationalist army and bring it up to speed. Stillwell was the highest Foreigner in the Chinese government of the time, but it was impossible for him to get his subordinates to follow orders and cks was simultaneously unable to delegate anything and unwilling to listen to expert advice. The beginning of a lot of unforced errors.
22. Exposition of Madame CKS: a very charismatic figured that was able to endear the Americans to the Chinese cause. Because of her acting as interpreter, she was able to insinuate herself into processes for which she was not qualified (p.398). Famine in the heavily bombed Chongqing, and mother's exchanged children. ("You eat mine, I'll eat yours". p.398)
23. Unforced errors by CKS, one right after another: 200,000 Nationalist troops guarding 50,000 Red troops while Chongqing is raped; unwillingness to form a united front with the Communists. Unwillingness to fight in Burma to open up land supply lines for Chinese troops.
Chinese troops were poorly trained, with a kill ratio of 40 Chinese to 1 Japanese. (Peasants also HATED the corrupt KMT troops, even burying them alive when they fled from the Japanese.) CKS would not send equipment to his soldiers (for fear of independent-minded generals), with the result that there was 1 gun for every 3 soldiers.
Some of the provinces collaborated with the Japanese. Some of the Nationalist troops even sold food to Japanese as Chinese people starved. The KMT was fatally weakened by the Japanese "Operation Ichigo."
24. This is the period after the defeat and unconditional surrender of Japan, and the surviving world powers are recalibrating their strategy based on this new information. Patrick Hurley (about as mentally sharp as the Joe Biden of 2023) became the point man on China. His American colleagues describe him as a senile old man who couldn't keep his mind on any subject (p
438). The Communists are still relatively weak at this point.
25. CKS had ≈half a dozen fully operational divisions, each with 11,000 men. On paper it was one thing, but in reality it was another very weak thing. The junta government very determindely sets about making enemies of the common people (bad inflation / economic conditions / confiscatory taxes while the KMT lived in luxury). US tried repeatedly to get him to make friends with the Communists, but he would not. Several truces have the Communists time to regroup.
26. Hyperinflation creates more official corruption, and the Communists make friends with land reform. Nationalists stay in cities and ignore the vastly more numerous countryside. More missteps cost CKS 100,000 men and the numerical advantage in favor of the Nationalist shrinks from 3:1 to 2:1. By mid November, the Communists were in control of all of Manchuria. At this point, CKS has used up all of his chances, and Truman is aware that the aid ends up mostly in the bank accounts of the "Four Families" (Songs/Chiangs/Kungs/Chen brothers).
The Communists had more boots on the ground in the countryside, and therefore more contacts. They also believed in total annihilation.
The Americans (yet again) have a confused policy and poor understanding of the facts on the ground.
The Huai-Hai campaign (Xuzhou) cost the Nationalists 200,000 men.
Epilogue: Final collapse and flight to Taiwan. (A cute play on the famous Jewish phrase: "Next year in Jerusalem" as "Next year in Nanking.") Final assessment of CKS, and speculation about counterfactual scenarios.
FINAL VERDICT: A very tough read. Not for the faint of heart.
Vocabulary:
Comprador
Satrap
Puttee
brigandage
incommoded
strafe
marcelled hair style
flapper dress
pine marten
solar topi
Yalta agreement